City Slickers, Country Bumpkins, Ants, Robots and Mutants, Part 2

Mr. Simak, I realize that you have done almost everything in newspaper work from printer’s devil to publisher . . . but I know also that you have spent much of the past half century either on the beat, in the slot, or on the rim—then have gone home and written highly effective fiction that same day. How did you do it? —Robert Heinlein, in a letter congratulating Simak on being named SFWA’s 1977 Grand Master

Heinlein goes on to say that the question is rhetorical: ” . . . I would be incapable of understanding the answer and would continue to be amazed.”

Simak was the third recipient of SFWA’s Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award, following after Jack Williamson in 1976 and Heinlein himself in ’75. He won his share of other awards as well: the 1953 International Fantasy Award for City; Hugos in 1959 (for his novelette “The Big Front Yard”), 1964 (for his novel Way Station), and 1981 (for “Grotto of the Dancing Deer,” which incidentally also won the Nebula, Locus and AnLab Awards for Best Short Story); and three or four other ones including the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award in ’88 along with Fritz Leiber and Frank Belknap Long.

Think about that for a minute. The Horror Writers of America (HWA), who give out the Stokers, define the Lifetime award as “Presented periodically to an individual whose work has substantially influenced the horror genre.” Note the other two recipients that year, Leiber and Long, both fine writers of fantasy, both dark and not. Simak, though?

It’s not simple, as befits a deceptively intricate writer. Although Simak is known for his rural characters and settings, there’s more there than meets the stfnal eye. Author, editor and critic Barry Malzberg (who penned the introduction for the Simak collection Physician to the Universe) says:

Simak had an odd, tormented streak; try “Second Childhood” . . . from early Galaxy. Why Call Them Back From Heaven? is a quasi-zombie novel. Simak is now mislabeled as a gentle pastoralist, the codgers’ farmer in the dell, but take another look.

That’s Simak’s rep all right, and in the main it’s accurate enough. Look, though, at just the titles of many of his novels and stories: They Walked Like Men, The Werewolf Principle, Cemetery World; “Hellhounds of the Cosmos,” “Bathe Your Bearings in Blood!”, “A Death in the House,” “The Thing in the Stone.” Any of those could have been titles written by one of the Lovecraft Circle.

As for the stories themselves, yeah, Simak had his dark side and no mistake. One of my favorites, an obscure little tale originally published in the March ’41 Astounding as “Masquerade” and subsequently reprinted by Donald Wollheim as “Operation Mercury” in the Tales of Outer Space side of his only Ace Double double anthology[i] (if you’ll excuse the necessary clumsiness), concerns two races alien to each other—humans and Mercurians—who would like to find a basis of cooperation, but can’t. There’s no great conflict, no hatred, but neither is there any foundation for friendship. The story, aside from a scene where the energy-based Mercurians dance wildly to the bluegrass fiddling of a human crewman called “Old Creepy,” is melancholy, almost tragic. It might not seem so in the colder light of 2011, but seventy years ago this was pretty dark—especially for ASF[ii].

For that matter, read his 1951 story, “Good Night, Mr. James” (also published as “Night of the Puudly” in the UK and adapted—badly—as an episode of The Outer Limits titled “The Duplicate Man”). This is a profoundly human story, far darker and more layered than “Masquerade.” It involves an illegal clone, a vicious and intelligent alien called a puudly, and a tragic case of mistaken identity. There’s no Yankee trader ready to take advantage of vacationing out-of-towners here, no hillbillies, just the quiet devastation of a human life. Twice.

Even the darkness, though, is tinged with compassion. There is a scene in Goblin Reservation in which the viewpoint character, Peter Maxwell, makes an unpleasant choice based to a large degree on practicality, but also out of a sense of the right thing to do, the Human thing to do. One of the few banshees left in the world is dying, alone and despised. Out of duty, others are holding a wake, but no one but Maxwell will simply sit with it as it dies, company in its last moments:

He walked slowly across the intervening space and stopped a few feet from the tree. The black cloud moved restlessly, like a cloud of slowly roiling smoke.

“Sit then,” the Banshee said. “It will not be for long . . . .The others did not come,” the Banshee said. “I thought, at first, they might. For a moment I thought they might forget and come. There need be no distinction among us now. We stand as one, all beaten to the selfsame level. But the old conventions are not broken yet. The old-time customs hold.”

“I talked with the goblins,” Maxwell told him. “They hold a wake for you. The O’Toole is grieving and drinking to blunt the edge of grief.”

“You are not of my people,” the Banshee said. “You intrude upon me. Yet you say you come to sit with me. How does it happen that you do this?”

Maxwell lied. He could do nothing else. He could not, he told himself, tell this dying thing he had come for information.

It would have been perfectly easy for Maxwell to pretend to care for this dying entity, or to reflect its own abhorrence of the human race; it wouldn’t have cared, and nobody else was around to see. But no, despite his primary reason for being there (read the book to find out, you will not regret it), he still could not bring himself to effectively slap the banshee across its face. That might be the human thing to do, but it wouldn’t be Human.

Let me elaborate on that, with your kind indulgence. From a purely practical standpoint, Maxwell would be justified in asking the dying thing (it’s an alien, not a Terran creature of the fantastic) what it knows about the novel’s Mysteries, including how his Other Self had died. He goes there, in fact, with that intention in mind and is frustrated by the creature’s unwillingness to give him the answers he needs. No one would have been angry; no one would have blamed him had he tried to somehow force the banshee to tell him.

He doesn’t, though. Instead, he asks the entity if there’s anything he can do to make its passing easier, and as it becomes more talkative, tells it “You should conserve your strength.” There’s no badgering, no harrying of the dying energy-being, not even anger until, with its last “breath,” it becomes recalcitrant and refuses to tell him anything. Instead, he sits with it as any human might sit with a dying stranger; so that even the most inhuman, unlikeable life form, one with no emotional connection with (and nothing but a mild contempt for) Humanity would not have to die alone and ignored.

That simple gesture of compassion is a touchstone of Simak’s perception of what Mankind means, and the scene one of his most eloquent expressions of how a good man responds to the Darkness surrounding him.

You know something? I’m almost 4000 words into a column that generally runs no more than 2200, and I am nowhere near being done talking about this writer. Not only that, but I have another seven pages of bibliography to present you.

You guys know me by now, and you know I can wax as loquacious as the next guy (assuming the next guy is as long-winded as I am), but Simak (not pronounced “SY-mak” as I said it as a kid, or even “Sih-mak” as I have since then, but “SIH-mik”) was quite a significant influence on my own fiction, and I’ve read and enjoyed almost all of his books and stories. I hope I can pass along at least some of my enthusiasm to you, the readers, but in any case please bear with me; I’ll take a look at a couple more of my favorites and then return you to your regular Grantvillian pursuits.

****

A million years ago there had been no river here and in a million years to come there might be no river—but in a million years from now there would be, if not Man, at least a caring thing. And that was the secret of the universe, Enoch told himself—a thing that went on caring. (From Way Station)

Not many writers are capable of summing up Humanity and its place in the cosmos. Many try throughout their careers to do so, devoting reams of paper to the task, always falling short. Poets, novelists, playwrights, essayists; all have done their level best to define the Human Condition, seeking and creating complexities, looking in the darkest corners of their souls to find the one identifying characteristic that separates Man from, say, Plant.

Clifford Simak did it in fewer than sixty words. That’s what.

Way Station is Simak at his best, combining that pastoral gentility he’s so well known for with a subtle, but deep-rooted melancholia that makes Ray Bradbury look a little like Ohio Express[iii] lyrics.

Enoch Wallace didn’t die in the War Between the States. Instead, he was chosen by aliens to tend the Terran depot of an intergalactic transport system, which has remained hidden from prying Terran eyes until now, when the Gummint notices that he’s still, y’know, alive, which makes them curious. This is made worse when the body of an alien is disinterred by a Gummint man. There were already plenty of questions being asked—you can’t be 100+ years old and not attract some attention—and things get a little uncomfortable.

Wallace is something of a loner, as are many of Simak’s people. Not entirely, but since he’s more than a century old, that kinda precludes his palling around with the local bowling team. He does have some “human” companions, but are they ghosts? They may as well be, but actually they’re projections of long-dead friends who eventually leave him. The locals are more protective of him than suspicious, but his loneliness is a necessary adjunct of his “job.” His best friend, in fact, is Ulysses, the alien who recruited him to begin with. There is a girl though; mute, deaf, and possessed of certain . . . talents, she is the only one of her redneck family who wouldn’t sell the other members for a jug o’ moonshine.

The crisis (all good stories have some kind of crisis, or they ain’t stories) comes when Wallace, an intelligent man with access to other-worldly science, determines irrefutably that Earth is headed for an unavoidable atomic conflagration. The ultimate outcome is . . . but no, that would be telling.

Artificial longevity, aliens, intergalactic teleportation, and there’s even some virtual reality (a la Bradbury’s “The Veldt”) as well. Those are the science fictional elements, and most any of Simak’s contemporaries could have woven a pretty good yarn from them. Hell, Asimov alone could have kicked it out of the park.

Trouble is that Asimov, however erudite and visionary, had a tendency to create thin, almost wooden characters. In a very real way, his people were there to handle the hardware, to hold it up in front of the reader and (in effect) say, “See? Isn’t this cool?”?

Simak was never satisfied with just the technology. For him, that meant nothing without the human component. He was a raraavis in the world of Science Fiction, at least for his time—an author for whom Character was just as important as Idea. There are lots and lots of ideas out there to be marveled at, believe me: time dilation and relativity, artificial intelligence, alien-human compatibility, magic rings/swords/books, smart-alecky kids who do wizardry, and so on.

Good fiction, though, demands a story not just about hardware or weird beasties but how those concepts affect—and are affected by—humans. Just plain folks. That’s what Simak excelled at. Don’t get me wrong; you can’t take the fantastical element out of his stories without losing the humanity, too. Way Station would fall apart without the artificial longevity, aliens, intergalactic teleportation and so on against which Simak cast his characters, no doubt about it, but at the same time without the people there would be little for the hardware to do.

This really is rarer than you might think. There are plenty of sf writers who are, as we say, idea driven, and more than a few who are character driven. Those who can do both at the same time, seamlessly, are exceptional. Simak leads that pack, in mine own (not-so-) humble opinion.

There’s more to it, although for almost anyone else that would be plenty. Simak’s stories, long- or short-form, are laced with wit. Not just humor, for all that there’s plenty of it to be found (there’s something really comical, if slightly surreal, about Mercurian energy beings frenetically square-dancing to Old Creepy’s fiddlin’), but wit; i.e., skill at engaging the reader and giving his characters depth and breadth. He doesn’t resort to giving them funny hats like so many others do, but instead creates richness and intensity that elevates him away from the level of mere pulp.

In Goblin Reservation (Putnam 1968), for example, he gives us a well-educated Neanderthal named Alley-Oop, alien bad guys who run around on wheels instead of feet, an android saber-tooth, William Shakespeare in the flesh, and a ghost (just called Ghost) with whom the late playwright pals around. Ghost knows he’s a ghost, but doesn’t remember just whom he is a ghost of. You get the idea. Well into the story, Ghost suddenly recalls that he is the spirit of . . . Willy the Shake, himself. Both of them are more than a little freaked out, understandably, and take off running and screaming.

It’s not over yet, however. During the magnificent dénouement of this wonder-filled book, when superb chaos reigns and the truly magical egg is hatching, we see Shakespeare and his own ghost, reconciled and again friends, dancing together in a moment of pure enchantment. My god, what a book this is.

****

[W]hat I recall is meeting Cliff Simak [at Chicon II, the 1952 world convention] . . . There, sitting with him in a Chicago hotel room, sipping a little good whiskey and talking about ourselves and our worlds, I really got to know and love him. The writers of good science fiction are nearly always bright and interesting and likable, but Cliff has a genuine humanity, something calmly wise and warm that is all his own.

No less a stfnal personage than Jack Williamson wrote that about our subject in his memoir, Wonder’s Child: My Life in Science Fiction (Blue Jay 1984), and I think it sums up Simak’s gift elegantly. “Calmly wise and warm” isn’t just a richly-deserved paean but a goal, a challenge.

From a personal perspective, I can cite Clifford D. Simak as a major influence on my own writing. Without “The Big Front Yard” and “Idiot’s Crusade” (among others) there would be no Gentleman Mechanic from Central Garage, Virginia, no hobos in space, and precious little else of a fictional nature from Yours Truly. One of the great disappointments of my life is that I was never able to find a copy of the first edition of City (which is, after all, a history of the Webster family) for him to sign.

Still, the legacy he left for me and countless other reader/writers in the field is for all practical purposes incalculable. One of the greatest compliments I’ve ever been paid as a bookseller was when a young college-aged customer returned to my table this past year at a local convention and said, “Last year you suggested I buy Way Station. I’ll buy anything else you suggest.” I take only a small part of the credit for that, much as it made me beam for a couple of hours. The calmly wise and warm Clifford Simak deserves it all. I’ll give the last word to a critic and commentator far more articulate than I, Barry Malzberg, himself a humanist of great warmth and skill:

Simak’s work is already buried, but he knew that was inevitable and all of it is informed by wonder in the face of oblivion. What a great writer and more importantly: what a good man.

[i] D-73, to be exact; the other side was Adventures in the Far Future. I’ve written about this little gem in detail in my “D-73—A (Sp)Ace Oddity” column, which is reprinted in the collection of those columns, Anthopology 101: Reflections, Inspections and Dissections of SF Anthologies, available from The Merry Blacksmith Press. Just so you’ll know. Ahem.

[ii] Not all Astounding stories are upbeat adventures about human smart/tough-guys outsmarting hide-bound aliens, much as many people (including myself) tend to believe so. Campbell responded to darkness as well, as he proved only too well with Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” among others. A good story is a good story, regardless of tone.

[iii] They recorded “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” back in 1968, the same year Frank Zappa released his Sgt. Pepper parody, We’re Only In It for the Money. Rock ‘n’ roll is funny.

(As usual, the bibliography below is as complete as I can make it, and I welcome additions and corrections. For Novels and Collections, “hc” designates hardcover and “pb”, paperback. UK editions are listed in a similar fashion. My thanks to Phil Stephensen-Payne and Scott Henderson for their expert help in compiling this monster.)

Short Stories

“The World of the Red Sun”—December 1931 Wonder Stories

“The Voice in the Void”—Spring 1932 Wonder Stories Quarterly

“Mutiny on Mercury”—March 1932 Wonder Stories

“Hellhounds of the Cosmos”—June 1932 Astounding Stories

“The Asteroid of Gold”—November 1932 Wonder Stories

“The Creator”—March/April 1935 Marvel Tales (Volume 1, #4)

“Rule 18”—July 1938 Astounding Science-Fiction

“Hunger Death”—October 1938 Astounding Science-Fiction

“Reunion on Ganymede”—November 1938 Astounding Science-Fiction

“The Loot of Time”—December 1938 Thrilling Wonder Stories (Plagiarized as “S.O.S in Time” by Australian “writer” Durham Keith Garton under the pseudonym “Durham Keys” in the October 1950 issue of the Australian magazine, Thrills Incorporated.)

Empire—Galaxy Novel #7, 1951 (digest-sized); something of an oddity in that Simak wrote the book based on an unpublished novel by a teen-aged John W. Campbell. In Clifford D. Simak: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (G. K. Hall, 1980), compiler Muriel Becker quotes Simak: “Empire was essentially a rewrite of John’s plot. I may have taken a few of the ideas and action, but I didn’t use any of his words. And I certainly tried to humanize his characters.” It was ultimately rejected by Campbell for Astounding for unknown reasons.

Time and Again—Simon & Schuster, 1951 (hc); Dell 680, 1953 as First He Died (pb, originally serialized as “Time Quarry” with a variant ending)

Mastodonia—Ballantine/Del Rey, 1978 (hc, also published as Catface by Sidgwick & Jackson in the UK the same year. Significantly expanded and re-written version of the short story, “Project Mastodon,” originally in the March, 1955 Galaxy)

The Worlds of Clifford Simak—Simon & Schuster, 1960 (hc); Avon G-1096, 1961 (pb); also published in the UK by Faber and Faber as Aliens for Neighbours that same year. First edition collects twelve stories; US paperback collects six; Faber and Faber edition collects nine. In 1962, Avon published G-1124, Other Worlds of Clifford Simak, which collects the other six stories from the first edition.)

All the Traps of Earth and Other Stories—Doubleday, 1962 (hc); Macfadden, 1963 (pb). Bibliographically, this book is complicated. The first edition collects nine stories, the 1963 paperback collects six; in the UK, the book was split into two separate books: the 1964 Four Square paperback with the same title as the US, which collected four of the original nine stories, and The Night of the Puudly from the same publisher the same year, which collects the remaining five. Geeks like me live for this kind of stuff.)

Worlds Without End—Belmont L92-584, 1964 (pb, collects three novelettes. First hardcover was the UK Herbert Jenkins edition of 1965)

In addition to the two listings just above, there have been multiple publications of those few Simak stories which have fallen into the public domain, too numerous to mention here. Regardless of the quality of the various bindings and cover designs, the material remains well above average and the reader should not reject those publications out of hand. After all, one eats the sandwich, not the wrapper.